


Dear

by failsafe



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Bonding, F/F, First Meetings, Flirting, Interspecies Relationship(s), Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 21:18:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1564451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After another misadventure, the Doctor leaves Vastra responsible for a human girl. The human girl, Jenny, does not quite know what she is getting herself into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katmarajade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katmarajade/gifts).



> The angst isn't terribly heavy and I tried not to be too gory or gratuitous but there is mention of blood, given that Vastra drinks it and also eats people. I tried not to go too far beyond what the show implies, but that is why the rating. I love writing early relationship stuff. I really hope you like it!

When the Doctor left this time, as was his wont to do, Vastra knew that she was left with more of his mess to clean up after than usual. If she had not owed him so much—life, security, and possibly her sanity among those debts—she thought she might not have cleaned up after it at all. It was, after all, delicate, and she was a reptile.

It was simply not in her reptilian nature to have patience for such things.

The nature of this procedure was not very clear, either. Unlike the complicated fastening and carrying that the rather restrictive, puffy clothes the Doctor had recommended as better protection than any more practical attire, this required an understanding of the creatures who had come to inhabit her world while she'd slept that she did not yet possess. Living in a disguise was different than acting out like them.

The Doctor should have known.

Nonetheless, the Doctor wasn't there anymore, so Vastra approached the stairs and took the first few, hearing them settle beneath her careful step.

“Human child?” she called. She wasn't sure she knew its name.

“Doctor?” the human girl called. When she emerged from the door she'd apparently jammed shut—based on the rattling and soft cry of discomfort she'd just heard from its other side—she was carrying a candlestick with several prongs, each of them lit. She sighed before the girl had a chance to continue, softly. It didn't deter the girl from coming out onto the above landing, her left hand reaching down to clutch at the pantaloons she'd stripped her lower half down to for the purposes of running. “Doctor!” the girl shouted, a little more toward the ceiling than down to the bottom floor. She supposed she sensed his absence. “You didn't leave me with her? Did you?” she demanded.

Vastra lifted her hand in a gesture of peace.

“Human child,” she repeated, trying a third step up toward her.

Then it gestured outward in so wide an arc Vastra was certain one of the candles would fall out, clatter to the floor, and set the space between them in flames. As it happened, some of the wax just dropped to and coated the floor.

“Don't come any closer!” the human girl demanded.

“I am afraid you must see that I must,” Vastra insisted, taking one more step. Nine more to go.

“You do and I'll burn you!” the girl said, voice so clipped at the end that the word was hardly distinguishable. With the Doctor's presence and his machine gone, her understanding of the language was very slightly lacking. But there was also something quite thick about the way the girl spoke.

“What is the meaning of this nonsense? I am making an attempt to help you, which I am sure you know he trusts me to do.”

“Why would he leave you to do it?”

“He is my ally, and I do those things which the Doctor needs me to do, following his appearances.”

“You're not making no sense,” the child said emphatically. She rose to her full height and righted the candlestick properly—no more wax dripping to the floor.

Vastra took the opportunity for two steps. Seven.

“I said don't come any closer!” the human shrieked, and it came out so fantastically _wavy_ at the end that Vastra wondered if she'd discovered yet another new call they made. It wasn't quite a scream, which was the one she was used to. It earned a slow, contemplative stare and blink from her before she made another attempt at progress.

“I do not mean to hurt you.”

“Hurt me? You tried to _eat me_!” the human replied. 

Vastra shook her head curtly.

“A case of mistaken identity, I assure you.”

“You tried to eat me and you're _green_ ,” the human insisted. 

“I believe the Doctor might say that was quite rude.”

All at once, and a bit to her surprise, she realized that the next sound the human child made was a quick burst of laughter. Then it shook its head a little. Then the human's gaze moved downward, Vastra noted by the flickering flame that it held near its face. The rest of the structure had mostly gone dark, and in the moment that followed, Vastra noticed the silence outside.

“I just want to go home,” the girl said after a moment, and Vastra realized that perhaps she had misjudged. The child seemed older, perhaps, than she had suspected. Something in the tone of her voice.

“I can take you there. No one will harm you upon your journey with me,” Vastra offered.

“I can't,” the human said, and suddenly it approached a table much closer to the stop of the staircase, setting down the candlestick. Then she gripped at the edges of the surface and glanced down in Vastra's direction. “Could you excuse me?” she requested.

“Where will you go?” Vastra felt obligated to ask. She also had the suspicion that she was not going to allow it without an escort.

“Nowhere!” the girl exclaimed dryly, trudging to the top of the first step, dragging her feet a little, scuffing her shoes against the floor. Shoes and pantaloons alone on bottom, human boy's shirt shrugged on over top. She'd start a riot outside, alone. “Could you let me past or am I going to have to run?”

“There would be very little point,” Vastra said, trying for the same tone that had made the human laugh before. She had decided in the last few moments that this was a better alternative to screaming.

“Are you threatening me?” the girl asked, sounding something between threatening herself and drolly amused.

“I would not dream of it. The Doctor has left you in my care.”

The girl looked down and Vastra noted the twin shadows beneath her eyes as the dark little whiskers above them brushed pale, smooth skin.

“Yeah, far as I know that doesn't exclude you from eating my heart and leaving me to die,” the human said after a moment.

Vastra was left to stand there for a moment, realizing that in the interval of her paying attention that the girl was right at her side, just one step above. Breathing in and out, she could smell her blood and her sweat, but the mention of her heart certainly didn't make Vastra feel any return of appetite.

“My,” Vastra said eventually, her hands going down to clutch at the heavy encasement of her skirts. The word stood alone as a sentence for a long moment. “Are you a dramatist?” she asked.

The child smiled again, even though Vastra had made no attempt at wit. She saw it seem to overtake her face and some grimace of resistance warring with it, wrinkling her nose and drawing her lips in contradictory directions that did make them look ever so pliable.

“Nah,” the girl said, shaking her head and meeting the woman's eyes. “I'm a nobody, see. Little urchin.”

“You're too old, I'm afraid, to be an urchin.”

“Didn't know there was such a limit.”

“What is your name, child?”

“Thought you were just finished telling me I wasn't one,” the girl said, tilting her head in what Vastra thought was defiance. She did seem so much between the child and adult forms of these human creatures. Judging by her form, she seemed ready to carry on like a woman, but there was a wildness about her. Not uncommon among the Silurians but not of the same kind and, Vastra took it, quite alarming.

“I would like a name I can call you,” Vastra insisted.

“Jenny,” the girl—Jenny—said with a little back and forth sweep of her eyes. “Jenny Flint. Good for setting fire to things and at your service.” She did a strange little curtsey in those pantaloons on the stairs that made her hard not to mistake for a dramatist.

“Are you? Well, that's good then. I think you'll do quite nicely,” Vastra said, though the phrasing seemed a bit like drama, too. Mimicry, though that was most of what she did in these times.

“Sorry?” Jenny asked, and the irregular, dark crescents of hair above her eyes lifted a bit, seemingly of their own accord.

“I would like to take you on as my... housekeeper,” Vastra volunteered, searching for the right word. She did not want to be perceived as pitying Jenny more than she was. The truth was, Jenny was the first human she'd met who so easily fell into civil conversation with her. Not that she'd given many of them opportunity, but it still seemed significant, innate in the human. Vastra turned herself a little to create a wider gap to her side along the side of the staircase Jenny had occupied for the last several minutes.

Eyebrows lowering back down, Jenny turned her gaze to the foot of the stairs and began to trod her way down with such tramping inelegance that it seemed obvious she also knew how to dance quite elegantly—just the sheer rhythm of it.

“You're mad and you're green, too. What are you supposed to be? A kind of creature from the moon or something?”

“Why ever would you think that?” Vastra asked, voice playing tricks in her throat and verging on indignation.

“Mars, then!”

“From what I understand, they may be our kin, but no.”

“What? You're like Martian but _not_ a Martian—then what are you?”

“My,” Vastra repeated in a slight huff as she followed after Jenny to the bottom of the stairs. “You really weren't paying attention. I am a reptile, dear child.”

“You keep saying 'my' and I might think you own me,” Jenny said, turning away with a curiously charming indifference as she led the way to the front, door. “Shall I hold it for you, ma'am?” she asked, play-acting at her new role, Vastra supposed. Vastra didn't know how to have a housekeeper anymore than Jenny knew how to be one, but she could do nothing but suppose she would learn that about humanity, too.

\- - -

Jenny hadn't known what she was getting into. She really hadn't. And most days it was alright.

Most days it was nice.

The house was big and spaces of it were filled with a white-yellow light when the sun was out, a bit like being outside but not so rough as the streets.

She found things to do. There were rarely particular orders given to her, but she knew how to keep a house. She hadn't been the one responsible for it at home, back when she'd had a home. No, she'd known the other side of things—having a servant, being the one to give the orders. She wondered if it were kinder to tell a servant what to do rather than to leave them alone.

She supposed she'd never know.

When the house was tidy for the day, clean for the next, Jenny found other pursuits.

The third week, she'd approached Madame Vastra to ask for something for the first time. It was careful, planned, and in the form of asking a favour.

She waited until evening when Madame Vastra stirred the most around the house before she went out for the night. She was, occasionally, awake during the daylight hours that Jenny regularly occupied, but she'd waited patiently for four days after deciding to ask, trying to decide when would be the best time.

She moved quietly through the house, stopping on her way to the Madame's study several times before continuing on with a steady pace. When she got there, she lingered at the door. She glanced down at herself in her dark clothes that were a sort of uniform. Her hair looked a little like a mouse in the fading light and she frowned at its straight strands for a moment before she decided it was too late to do anything about it. She had stopped drawing it back since she'd begun to work for Madame Vastra.

“Excuse me, ma'am?” she asked.

When Madame Vastra looked up, Jenny wondered if she had made a mistake. She had not yet learned to read the unusual ridges, the rises and falls of her face. She frowned a little, trying to make sense of them and making more creases in her own skin.

“Yes, Jenny?” Madame Vastra asked. She had noticed that she had begun calling her by her name more often.

“I was hoping to find you while you were awake, ma'am,” Jenny prefaced, she hoped politely.

“Yes. Yes, I am awake,” Madame Vastra replied. Jenny could not tell if it was dismissive or not.

“Yes,” she agreed, not knowing what else to say. She glanced down and wandered a few mindless steps into the sudy without invitation. It was only moments after she'd done it that she remembered that if she were a servant in a real home with a real mistress that she'd have been in a lot of trouble. She glanced up, incrementally, a bit frightened. When she saw nothing of anger, only possibly curiosity, on Madame Vastra's face, she decided that she liked this better.

“I do not mean to be rude, but you must go on, dear. I have work to do.”

Jenny furrowed her brow even tighter, reaching up and running her thumb along the carved edge of a very fine desk. She wondered where a lizard woman got such a nice desk.

“What is it you do? When the Doctor's not around,” Jenny asked. It hadn't been what she'd come here for, but she supposed if she was going to stay that it was important information.

“Why, I'm a detective, dear. I thought you knew,” Madame Vastra answered, blinking a few times and returning her attention to slips of paper strewn across the desk in a way that seemed too perfect to be for anything but show.

“But you eat people?” Jenny asked, only a little of a question.

“When there is nothing to be done for them—physically or morally, depending upon the situation,” Madame Vastra replied easily. The answer was so smoothly entered into Jenny's consciousness that it was as if she'd forgotten having asked the question. She shook her head a little, causing what felt like a slight sway through the rest of her.

“Are you ever going to hurt me?” Jenny asked, simply because it was the only question that followed.

“Never. If there is anything to be done, I will never hurt you,” Madame Vastra replied quickly, firmly. It sounded like she'd been thinking about it.

“Why _not_ me?” Jenny asked, a bit afraid to know the answer but watching Madame Vastra closely.

“We are predator and prey. It simply depends on which point of view you are considering—which of us is which,” Madame Vastra explained patiently. Jenny noticed that she slid some of her notes out of the way. A newspaper lay beneath.

Jenny glanced back and forth along the top of the desk, idly searching for dust she had not seen earlier in the day. She didn't find any. Being thorough was one way to stop yourself going mad in such strange silence.

“Nobody could prey on you,” she said eventually, sounding a little more eager than she had expected. She rocked her weight a little and tiptoed slightly, looking at Madame Vastra across her desk. “You're strong and good at hiding and you... _consume._ ”

“And this world has consumed all my brothers and sisters that I shall ever know,” Madame Vastra replied. “But you must not fear me, Jenny. I ask of you: don't fear me. What I take from the flesh of your kind is no longer and shall never be for the sake of recompense. It is simply my nature. We are different species,” she reminded her. And Jenny knew that.

“Maybe sometimes it ought to be,” she said suddenly, and she hadn't known where it'd come from. Only she did. She remembered pain and the smell of a fire that had burned—so contained but so insulting, so wounding—the night she'd been sent out into the cold.

“Possibly. But I know that I am in no position to decide,” Madame Vastra snapped softly. But then Jenny noted that she looked back up at her with a slight tilt of her still-unveiled head. “Thank you for understanding. Now what is it you wanted to see me about?”

Jenny had forgotten that she'd come for any other reason and started a little at the reminder, drawing her mind back.

“Yes, I was wondering. You have all these plants in the house, and I've never seen some of them before. I wondered if you might have any books on gardening. I see you've got a lot.”

“You read well?” Madame Vastra asked, and Jenny might have been offended, but she supposed she shouldn't be. There were still so many things they did not know about each other.

\- - -

It was early afternoon when Vastra returned home after a very, very long night that had taken her many more miles from home than she typically journeyed. She had not had the means to send a messenger for her housekeeper, so she decided that she must make her identity and presence known at once. She did not want to frighten the poor girl, and Vastra did not know whether she still looked upon her as a monster without enough warning.

“I apologize for the lateness of the hour,” Vastra said, stowing her umbrella away. She removed her veil and lingered at the door. She heard very little sound and wondered if her human companion had finally learned in her absence to sleep the regular hours of their little household. Regular insofar as Vastra could lay any claim to defining it as such.

She waited and there was still very little sound—just a little tinkling where some wind blew through an open window into the little indoor garden that had only increased since Jenny had read a book on the subject. The draft through the house smelled faintly of new flowers. New to the world, as far as Vastra was concerned.

She was struck, for a moment, by the notion that in her somewhat prolonged absence that Jenny had abandoned her. She felt stricken, though she wasn't quite sure how to relate that—the way it felt to her—in human terms. She supposed there might not be a need, now.

“Jenny,” she said softly, though hardly enough to carry anywhere but there in the doorway just before the room with surfaces covered in seedlings and flowers and ferns. The sound could not have carried, but that was when a sound carried back to her keen ears. It sounded like a labouriously-taken breath. It was followed by another and the sound picked up pitch as she quickly gathered her nerve and picked up her skirts from around her ankles, fast approaching the source of the noise.

Nearer the kitchen, she heard a wet sound and she finally recognized the rhythm and meaning of Jenny's sound. When she came around the corner and into the kitchen, she followed straight through into an empty space in the floor where she supposed there ought to have been some human furniture she'd never had the need for.

There, seated on the ground, legs sprawled out, Jenny held her face with one hand and leaned against the other. She wept. She kept weeping even as Vastra approached, and Vastra knew without any doubt that Jenny was not surprised by her presence by the time she knelt down beside her, holding her silence for the moment. She tilted her head, not quite sure what to do about the redness as the blood beneath Jenny's skin and the emanating heat of it made some angry redness around her eyes as they flooded.

Still lost for words, Vastra quietly investigated the scene just before Jenny. Jenny's clothes were white and flowed more freely than did her black day-dress. Vastra had known that Jenny owed the garment, seeing her finish preparations for the following day when darkness pervaded and Vastra was on her way out. Jenny had not changed. But there was another, much more vivid red staining about the front of the garment just beyond another red pool that she noticed met the edge of Jenny's hand, running beneath her fingertips. Jenny had laid her hand in it after it had spilled. More careful attention to the information provided by her nose, Vastra had no question as to what the liquid was.

“Jenny!” she cried out, only a little delayed, she hoped. “Jenny, are you hurt?”

“No. No, you—” Jenny seemed to ream out of her throat. Vastra knew from the tone, even through the swollen sound of her voice, that it was likely an insult that was about to issue from her housekeeper. It did not come. “It isn't mine,” Jenny said instead, shaking her head.

“... Silly, silly me,” Vastra replied with a gentleness that seemed less difficult than most. If she had paid even closer attention to the smell, she would have known without asking. She did not, for the moment, bother to identify the source.

“I thought you were gone. I thought you had left or... or that—” Jenny tried to explain, sniffling tighter and tighter until she went utterly silent for a moment. She blinked, gaze seeming thick with salt-water, until she met Vastra's gaze. The very thought that Jenny could fear for her was flattering.

“As you told me yourself once—it is very difficult for an individual human to _prey_ upon me,” she provided, understanding.

Jenny shook her head a little.

“I came down to make your tea for you, for when you came home. Because I've... because I've nowhere else to go. And I thought about it. I thought about it all morning, when I knew you weren't home yet. And I thought about how you almost always leave it half-finished, and I knew you... I knew you kept the bottle. And I decided to pour it for you—in the glass you like—but then _silly me_ , I smelled it. I... thought it might smell of grapes,” Jenny said, and Vastra was fairly certain it was the longest outpouring of words she'd heard from her since she'd taken residence there. They'd had many conversations. And they'd quietly existed together. But this was something knew.

“And it does not?” Vastra surmised, and she saw the pressure behind Jenny's lips that she recognized but also observed as it could not shape itself into a smile.

“No, it doesn't,” Jenny said, shaking her head and her eyes began to flood again. She lifted her hand and looked down at it, and Vastra saw the very different way the red outlined the markings in Jenny's palm. Once again no appetite was stirred, and in fact quite the opposite. She felt for her—the pain that Vastra thought about when the sun was bright and when she thought about her sisters.

“Do not be afraid of me, Jenny. Please, do not,” Vastra begged.

“I'm not. I'm not, but I'm... different now. I was always different, and I... knew it. But this is different, too,” Jenny said, shaking her head as her voice undulated again in a way that reminded Vastra of sad, poor parody of singing. She knew it came from Jenny's heart, though, and she slid around, barely noting as he own dark skirts slid through and wiped most of the spilled liquid on the floor away. She reached up and around and touched the side of Jenny's head, gently drawing it closer in a curious, tentative way.

Jenny gasped as if being drawn away to her death for a moment but then Vastra realized that, perhaps, it was just a trick of the gasping, sobbing breath.

“Oh, dear human,” Vastra said. “Dear Jenny,” she said. She felt another stillness blanket over them and Jenny did not respond at all for a moment. She wondered if she had offended further. Then she felt the warmth of the human head leaning back against her shoulder, the strange dampness of human hair finding her first exposed skin above her collar as it mashed and pressed irregularly while Jenny adjusted to lean into her. She was apparently not repulsed.

Vastra noticed, after a moment, that Jenny's eyes peered up at her and she looked down to meet the gaze, politely. Also with some concern that she had further missed something the human needed.

“Dear lizard lady,” Jenny said in a kind of flat, still damp tone. For a moment, Vastra dared not question it. Then it settled upon her how odd it sound. She remembered that 'lady,' was a sign of respect, but she did not know how deeply it was intended. Then, finally, she noticed the muscle tension behind Jenny's lips and finally it did give way to the happy curve that Vastra mirrored with few teeth.

She took Jenny's hand and drew it over her lap, holding the red-painted flesh. And she heard not fear, but laughter.


End file.
